Today data recovery is a multi-million dollar industry. The number of data recovery firms out there seems to exceed the number of fast food restaurants for the entire planet. These companies specialize in helping their clients retrieve data on anything from hard drives to flash-roms. In the following report, we will discuss what data recovery really is; the different types, the costs, and what you can realistically expect when it comes to getting your data recovered.
There are 7 symptom that of data loses:
1) Hard drive is clicking :
If you have a system that is in a somewhat contained area, you may look at adding an additional 80mm fan to cool the internal components of the system, especially the hard drive.
A clicking hard drive can indicate a head crash, corrupt firmware on the drive's ROM chip, an electrical problem like a burned chip, blown heads, a bad pcb controller, overwritten servo's, damage to the hard drive's platters and alignment issues from being dropped, jarred or a power surge.
2) System "blue-screens" :
If the drive has suffered a physical failure, then the recovery procedure is quite a bit more challenging. When your system blue screens when you try to boot or during the middle of an operation, it can mean the operating system has been damaged, there may be bad sectors on your hard drive that the system is unable to read, your hard drive could be failing, you might have a virus or trojan, someone may have deleted critical dll's or system files, the partition or file structure may have become corrupted or damaged.
3) Computer keeps re-booting :
A drive not formatted error usually indicates the the hard drive's partition has been damaged, deleted or corrupted. It can be caused by a virus, a hard re-boot, a power outage or surge, disc partitioning utilities and sometimes updating software, anti-virus programs or simply installing new software can damage a partition.
4) System freezes or hangs :
In cases where the electronic circuit board has failed on the hard drive, then you have to have the exact same circuit board on hand in order to retrieve the necessary circuit components for replacement. The most common reason a computer keeps re-booting over and over is because the boot sector has been hijacked by a virus that creates a continuous loop. It keeps telling the system to go back to the boot sector and re-boot.
5) Drive or device not found :
When your system freezes or hangs while trying to boot or while accessing a file or program it usually indicates that there are bad sectors on the hard drive and the system is unable to access the information it needs to open the file or load the program. It can be caused by a corrupt file or shared program files that have conflicting call procedures or too many system resources are being used (the system memory gets full or overloaded).
6) No operating system found
Types Of Hard Drive Failure When we discuss data recovery in this report, we will primarily focus on issues surrounding hard drive failures; since these types of failures are most common.
There are really two primary forms of failure in a hard drive, logical and physical. Logical failures are usually a result of file-system corruption. This can occur due to a virus, accidental deletion of key files or registry components, and in some cases even electro-static discharge.
There are really two sub-categories for physical hard drive failures; mechanical and electronic. Mechanical failures usually result from a failure of the spindle motor. Spindle motor failure can result from excessive heat due to a bearing failure. The increased heat resulting from the bearing failure will expand the drive shaft and therefore seize the spindle motor.
